Apples for teacher?

This long weekend has been a very busy one for me. My poor Cricut mat lost all of it's stickyness and I was unable to Cricut for about a week. I did however make it up last night because I bought a new mat and I was up cricutting until 2am! I just can't stop once I've started! So many ideas!!

I want to discuss something I referred to in my last post... The CAFE book (written by the 2 sisters). This book is a comprehensive literacy program, that gives you explicit strategies to help students become better readers and writers. Their first book THE DAILY 5 talks about their method for doing guided reading. It gives great ideas about how to keep the other students occupied with (meaningful) activities while you are able to take one student  or a group and work on their specific reading skills. The CAFE book is the squeal to this book. I feel it's the book with the most meat and potatoes, because this book outlines how to teach guided reading. It gives you a list of specific strategies to work on with individual students, and gives them something tangebale they can see and complete.
It is literally amazing.

But the best part is, it is specific enough that you can follow word for word, and it is also open-ended enough that you can take from it the strategies you choose. It is really quite amazing.

Today's teaching picture is going to be my CAFE Menu. This is a poster that is used to teach each reading strategy to the entire class. Each time you teach a new strategy you put it's corresponding card up in the correct section.
There is a section for Comprehension, Accuracy, Fluency, and Expand Vocabulary (hence CAFE). In each of the sections there are at least 6 specific strategies that people (not just students) use when they are reading. Students work through these strategies independently until they have mastered them.
As I alluded on last post, my theme this year is camping, and my CAFE Menu is nice and bright, but also full of flowers.. Enjoy!!

speaking of teaching.....

This post I am going to highlight one of the many baking projects I did this weekend...apple cupcakes

They don't taste like apples... actually these were lemon.. but they look like apples :)

They were a big hit!!

Thanks for reading!! 

(please leave a comment below... it's nice to know who is reading)